To celebrate the opening of the College’s new social and cultural centre, Whispering House, an exhibition of Leaving Certificate artwork from 2019 has been displayed. The artwork on display in Whispering House comprises the coursework elements completed by the Leaving Certificate candidates of 2019. Pupils had to produce two works of art for the coursework element, one craft and one imaginative composition. These entirely original works of art were conceived through the development of specific themes; ‘Balance’, ‘Indentation’ and ‘Familiar’.

Eight pupils sat the Leaving Certificate Art in 2019 and all at Higher Level. Their results were excellent – collectively they scored 718 points out of a potential maximum of 800! Two of the pupils have since gone on to study Art at third level.

The artwork was erected yesterday – see photos here.

Exhibitors:

Antonia Bullrich, Lucas Cho, Emily Devereux, Clara Eck, Florentine Kolb, Josephine Krieger, Jeanne Levesque, Isabelle Townshend

I feel challenged by young people around the world marching in protest against world governments failing to take action to prevent or counter the environmental catastrophe that we are facing. I let pupils in our Transition Year go, with their parents’ permission, drawing the line there, since gathering written permission from parents at the last minute in a boarding school is potentially problematic. Whether they felt strongly about the issue or merely wanted a day off school, is not for me to judge but it seems to have been a big event and it will certainly have attracted the attention of politicians. Let’s hope they have the courage to act. Momentum is building and it is exciting to see young people at the heart of such a powerful and positive movement.

In reality, I do have a problem with the idea of pupils missing school to make such a protest because disrupting education is rarely the right thing to do, but if those in government sit up and take notice it may not be a bad thing. However, what our own pupils need to understand is that marching and waving banners is actually the easy bit because it places the responsibility on other people to affect change. The harder challenge is for us all to make the changes in our own lives and in our own community, which will, slowly but surely, start to make a difference right here at St. Columba’s College. We cannot wait for politicians to legislate.

Yesterday in assembly I threw out a challenge to the pupils, namely that they, as a pupil body, should come up with a pledge, a manifesto, if you like, something concrete and practical, as to how we can make a difference right here in our own backyard. It might be about recycling, electricity, litter, water, traffic, clothing, food. We all like the idea of making a difference until it affects what we put on our plates, don’t we? We would prefer, I suspect, to believe that it is up to others, to politicians, to Greta Thunberg, to fight the battle, to address the United Nations, while we stand in the wings and applaud. But ask us to make personal sacrifices for the future of our planet…that is another thing altogether!

Personally, I have started to think about these things a lot more. I remember when I was at school and we had a visiting speaker on the strange topic of ‘ecology.’ He had long hair and an earring (we all had crewcuts and tight trousers and jackets) and we sneered at him and thought he was a bit of a weirdo. He spoke about the need to live sustainably and to look after the resources of the planet and it made a lot of sense, but we were all too cool to admit it to each other. Shame on us, but rather than engage with him and take him seriously we preferred to laugh at him. I don’t think anyone is laughing any more.

The programme for researchED Dublin at the College on October 5th is now available. Check it out below (to see it in closer detail, click the full-screen icon in the middle and navigate via the arrows).

We are delighted to announce details of this year’s Cultural Trip to London.  The trip will take place over the January Exodus (Friday Jan 24th to Monday 27th Jan) and is open to pupils in Forms IV and V, but is currently limited to 40 places (but this may increase). Places will be allocated on a “first come, first served” basis. The estimated cost of the trip is an all-inclusive €550, which includes:

  • Return flights between Dublin to London.
  • All bus, rail and underground transfers.
  • Three nights luxury hostel accommodation in Meininger Hotel, South Kensington (adjacent to the Natural History Museum), with breakfast, packed lunch and evening meals.
  • Tickets to a West End musical (show to be confirmed).
  • Ticket to cinema in Leicester Square.
  • A Thames cruise.
  • Dinner in Leicester Square restaurant on one night.
  • All entry fees & tours for museums and attractions including: The Science Museum, Covent Garden, Natural History Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, British Museum, Tower of London, Cabinet War Rooms & Churchill Museum.
  • A visit to China Town during Chinese New Year celebrations.

There is a jam-packed itinerary for the pupils, catering for a wide array of interests, and is a great way to experience London and see all its major attractions and museums.

To secure a place for your son or daughter please complete this online permission slip (please note, passport details are required at the time of booking). A deposit of €220 is also required and can be paid by cheque (made payable to St. Columba’s College). Alternatively, the deposit can be lodged directly into the College bank account (details available upon request).

If you require more information please do not hesitate to contact Mr. Jones or Mr. O’Shaughnessy.

We are living in an increasingly divided world. These divisions, which have always existed, are being exacerbated by the Twitter world that we now inhabit, to such an extent that civilised debate and respectful disagreement are now a rarity. Cowards, who would not enter a serious forum where they might have to listen to opposing opinions, stand anonymously in the shadows and whip up hate and resentment. At the same time faceless bots – so I am led to believe – are collecting our data from social media platforms and plying us with the news that we want to hear. Whatever your political or world view might be, you are being bombarded with rhetoric and news feeds that reinforce your suspicions and increase the gulf between you and those who may have the temerity to hold a different opinion.

In July we were staying with friends near Boston, Massachusetts and their oldest daughter was very keen to go to a campaign rally for one of the many potential Democrat candidates for the presidential race in 2020. The candidate was Kamala Harris, a lady of African American background and the Attorney General of California. She came across very well indeed and I enjoyed the experience of seeing the process at work to select the challenger to the current president. However, there was no disguising the immense divisions in US politics and it was not easy to see how that chasm could be bridged.

If I look across the Irish Sea I am dismayed by the increasingly extreme positions held by politicians on both sides…goodness only knows how that is going to turn out…while in many countries across the world you see more and more populist leaders, often preying on the prejudices of people in order to create a climate of fear against immigrants or foreigners. I experienced something similar living and working in South Africa, where occasionally shops and businesses of foreign nationals were attacked because they were ‘taking our jobs.’ On one occasion two people were killed in the local community, one of whom was a baker. A few days later I was told that the locals were complaining that there was a lack of bread. It is happening again now. Last week a girl from Zimbabwe, whom my wife and I are putting through university, told me that she could not travel back to South Africa because things were too dangerous for foreigners. Desperate and perhaps worrying times.

I am not really a party political animal and I am not trying to cast blame on left or right, liberal or conservative, East or West. But I was brought up to believe that fear and hatred were usually the product of ignorance. In other words, if I don’t know someone personally it is much easier to hate them or to give credence to the fearmongers. People like to cling on to their prejudices, but if I take the trouble to get to know people who are different from me I will find that they are mostly ordinary, decent people and that they may have good reason for their opinions. I am not suggesting that disagreements will vanish, but the violent rhetoric and the insanity of social media is currently driving us further apart and there has to be another way.

I remember in South Africa inviting some groups of staff to dinner, both black and white, we made sure there was a mix. We thought it was a fairly normal thing to do and it went well. But I was told subsequently by both a black and a white colleague, both in their 40’s and 50’s, that it was the first time that they had ever sat round a dinner table with a person of a different colour.

St. Paul says in one of his letters that in Christ there is neither male nor female, slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile. Those distinctions should mean nothing. 2000 years later we seem to have learned very little. People still seek to divide each other by means of religion, gender, race. I follow premier league football closely and just this new football season a number of black footballers, who have made errors in matches, have been subject to racist abuse on social media by anonymous trolls. Outrageous! Shockingly, anti-semitism is on the rise again across Europe and America. We seem to be regressing and going back to an era of intolerance and hatred. It is disheartening, but it is not good enough stand on the sidelines and shake our heads without doing anything about it.

Which brings me to St. Columba’s College. We cannot change the entire world overnight, but within our own community we have the ability to do things differently and be a model for others to copy. We need not follow the standards of the world but we must set our own standards, which are actually the standards of the New Testament, modelled by Jesus in the way that he treated people whatever their class, nation or gender. We are an international community, with many different languages and racial profiles, and inevitably there will be pupils here with different politics, different stances on social matters, different religious beliefs. Yet, we can learn to appreciate those around us who are different and ensure that every member of this school feels equally accepted and cherished, whatever their background. That does not mean that difficult discussions will not take place or that we should ‘no-platform’ those whose views we find unpalatable, as many universities have recently done, stifling debate and deepening divides between ‘us and them.’ I would hope that Columbans would not take their cues or views from the shrill voices on social media, sadly modelled by people who should know better. Rather, I hope they will listen to each other respectfully, engage in honest and robust debate, disagree amicably and learn to celebrate the diversity of beliefs, opinions and races that make up our community.

There are under 4 weeks to go until researchED Dublin, Ireland’s first-ever such event (on Saturday the massive London conference, with 1500 delegates and 170 speakers, was a huge success).

Our event is of course smaller, but certainly very high quality, and below are the titles of the 30 sessions available to delegates. The timetable will be released before long, and there will be some tough choices to make (5/6 sessions run concurrently apart from the first and last ones). More detail on sessions on the @researchEDDub Twitter account during this week. More on the speakers themselves here.

(in alphabetical order by speaker)

Neil Almond: I structure (most of) my maths lessons: putting research into practice

Kate Barry: Retrieval Practice for Long-Term Learning

Edmond Behan: Teaching students to collaborate: the impact of skills training on student engagement in collaborative learning.

Tom Bennett: Behaviour lessons from the best UK schools.

Fred Boss: Open Digital Badges in Formal Education in Ireland.

Pedro de Bruyckere: The Ingredients for Great Teaching.

Daisy Christodoulou: Seven Myths about Education (keynote address).

Daisy Christodoulou: Comparative judgement: an easier way to assess writing

David Didau: Making Kids Cleverer: A manifesto for closing the advantage gap

Stuart Farmer: Networked Learning Communities – the solution to effective professional learning of teachers?

Leona Forde: Getting research into practice: one school’s story of building a system for teacher-led professional development.

Rebecca Foster: On Bjork’s Desirable Difficulties in the classroom.

Gráinne Hallahan: The Batman Effect: what it does (and doesn’t) tell us about concentration in the classroom.

Eva Hartell: Comparative judgment – unpacking teachers’ assessment practices in STEM education.

Carl Hendrick: The Pedagogy Delusion: When Teaching Kills Learning

Humphrey Jones & Mary Singleton: A Research-Led Approach to School Science Laboratory Design.

Peter Lydon: Some Hard Truths from Gifted Education.

Ann Marcus-Quinn and Tríona Hourigan: Open Education and post-primary education.

James McCoy: Introducing a knowledge-rich curriculum at Key Stage 3: a case study.

Jennifer McMahon: ‘Learning from yesterday to prepare for tomorrow’: teacher perspectives on applying evidence to practice.

Conor Murphy: The Importance of Film: a brief history of its place at second-level, and how we can embed it in our schools.

Dianne Murphy: Seven Misconceptions About Teaching Adolescents to Read.

James Murphy: Six Kinds of Behaviour Problems and How to Deal With Them.

Mary Myatt: Curriculum: Controversies, Concepts and Conversations.

Mirjam Neelen: Teachers teach but do they learn? How to improve your own self-directed learning skills.

Sandrine Pac-Kenny: What they don’t tell you about learning a language!

Alex Quigley: Closing the Vocabulary Gap.

Tom Sherrington: Why are Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction so popular and so good?

Victoria Simms: Evidence-based primary maths: what is research really telling us?

Claire Stoneman: Senior Leadership: how can we help novice senior leaders learn?